Marinara in Her Veins
MARINARA IN HER VEINS
There’s no pretense with Michelle Kenney, executive chef/owner of La Dolce Vita Ristorante in Heritage Square in Downtown Oxnard. Behind her girlish face with smiling eyes, the chef ’s mind is attuned to the present and the future, which are about hard work in a business with tight margins.
She’s been part of La Dolce Vita for over 40 years, first with her mother, Gerry Moreno, in Hollywood Beach, and then with her husband, Greg. They branched out on their own in 2001 in Port Hueneme, moving to Heritage Square five years later.
The couple recently purchased the historic mustard-yellow house that’s been home to the restaurant for nearly 13 years—the Laurent-McGrath House, built in 1901. (In 1945, John McGrath purchased the home.)
Kenney knows how to hustle and does so with simple grace. It’s part of her DNA, stemming from growing up in the San Gabriel area within a food- and service-focused family of Italian immigrants from Prizzi, Sicily, on her mother’s side. One branch was sausage makers; her uncle Sam Perricone was hailed as a Southwest citrus industry giant. Great Aunt Mary started and ran Casa Maria Italian Restaurant in Alhambra, with the help of Michelle Kenney’s grandmother, Anna Ferraro.
Not surprisingly, there were huge Sunday family gatherings with pasta, meatballs and wine, where Kenney and the other kids shelled peas in the backyard.
“Marinara runs through my veins,” she says.
“Growing up with my grandmother, I learned to cook. She could make anything Italian from memory. I started my catering career when I was 12,” she says. “My grandmother was involved in church and community groups. … At the lunch meetings I set up the sandwiches, drinks and salads.”
If you look at the circa-1929 photograph hanging in the stairway at La Dolce Vita, of young dark-haired Anna sitting on a crescent moon, you can see that her grandmother had a little magic and whimsy too, a classy playfulness that lives on in Kenney.
“My grandmother and Great Aunt Mary were ahead of their time, a little unconventional,” she says, adding, “They weren’t the stay-at-home types.” In my mind’s eye I see women in the foreground of their own lives, women with entrepreneurial courage that they passed on.
After moving to Oxnard as a teen, Kenney worked her way up in her mother’s food businesses, including liquor stores and a deli where she made the sausage, pasta and croissants.
With the purchase of La Dolce Vita’s current location, Kenney and her husband are looking forward. They’re making design changes to the restaurant; the first project was to remodel the downstairs bar into a speakeasy-style lounge, called 1901 in honor of the building’s birthdate. Kenney, who has an interest in interior design, reshaped the bar to foster warmth and connection, and added copper sheeting to the top. “It’s a half octagon, instead of just a line, so people can see and talk to each other,” she says.
Customers’ favorite dishes will still be on the menu and she’ll be adding some creative touches. She recently started working with Plate Linguistics, which grows microgreens that are delivered the same day as harvested. “They will be really cool additions to our dishes, like lemon and citrus basil, and fennel and Red Garnet Amaranth,” she says. “We are the first restaurant to use these microgreens grown in Piru.”
This winter, the menu will feature seasonal dishes like Italian Wedding Soup with Swiss Chard; a fennel, radicchio and beet salad with pomegranate seeds; Gnocchi with Ragu of Wild Mushrooms and Hazelnuts; and lamb shanks that have been slow-cooked.
Kenney also will continue working to make the restaurant environmentally friendly. “I hate waste. Composting is a little tricky in Oxnard, but we pass on our food waste to chickens. Though we don’t do a lot of deep frying, what oil we do dispose of gets picked up to be used as biofuel.”
With her energy surge, Kenney is also republishing her cookbook La Dolce Vita: Recipes for Living the Sweet Life from 2008. It is notable that most recipes in the cookbook, as well as on her restaurant’s menu, are not covered in red sauce (though the vital staple makes its appearances). This is true of those she makes in traditional Italian style, and the ones she has put “a fresh California spin on.”
Just as she learned to cook alongside her grandmother, she is passing her knowledge on through monthly cooking classes with assistant Pat Perrine. “It’s for people who are interested in cooking and trying new recipes,” Kenney says. “Everyone eats together, and then we talk about what worked and what may not have worked, what we like, what we would do differently.”
The two have been teaching the classes together for 18 years. “It’s a yin-yang thing. Pat is kind of my sidekick. She has an engineering background. She has lots of tricks and tools, whereas I cook from feel. I can see how the dishes will turn out; it’s definitely instinctual and in my blood.”
